This year’s COCE theme calls attention to “many voices vying to lead, as well as those struggling to be heard” in our collective struggle to secure a future for our planet. There’s arguably no other place where these concerns are more timely and prescient than on the African continent. Across the continent, environmental pressures are felt more immediately than elsewhere on the planet. It is therefore not easy to isolate the environment and environmental concerns from communication in many contexts in Africa. Surprisingly, Environmental Communication, which is defined as the study of “the pragmatic and constitutive modes of expression—the naming, shaping, orienting, and negotiating—of our ecological relationships in the world, including those with nonhuman systems, elements, and species” (Pezzullo & Cox, 2022), though vibrant and growing in Europe, North America, and Asia has seldom included studies of African communication, and even less frequently scholarship from African perspectives. It is also true that communication scholarship on and from the continent, though often dealing with environmental concerns, very rarely features the methods, orientations, and concerns that have defined Environmental Communication to date. This panel gathers scholars with interests in African Communication Studies and Environmental Communication to consider how disciplinary mechanisms and practices in both environmental communication and African Communication Studies have functioned as infrastructures of obscurity and how we might plant seeds to generate more environmental communication research in, about, and from Africa in the future. Additional resources can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UNA7BKPPJCIWfIGtwaug93KcwFaoqKCekqRIOQGG4hg/edit?usp=drivesdk

While recognizing Cox’s argument that environmental communication is a crisis discipline, panelists will develop Pezzullo’s argument that environmental communication dialectically is a care discipline. They will do so with attention to a range of epistemological and theoretical perspectives on care, methodological considerations about the care work of research, and everyday practices and ecologies of care with/in our communities. Before opening the floor for discussion, roundtable participants will engage this topic in two ways. First, they will theorize care work as praxis in contexts of uneven vulnerabilities, informed by decolonial, intersectional feminist, queer, critical race, anticapitalist, and disability justice perspectives. Second, each will discuss multimodal practices derived from panelists’ environmental communication fieldwork, pedagogy, and community organizing. Panelists’ grounded examples that amplify and co-create practices of care work, include: (1) #StopFormosaPlastic transnational solidarity through hashtag activism, (2) disability justice at the Johnson County Poor Farm in Iowa, US; (3) anti-colonial energy justice collaborations among Puerto Ricans in the US diaspora and in Puerto Rico; (4) food justice and informal mutual aid organizing in the Bay Area, California, US, (5) sense-making discourses of Black men in environmental advocacy in the Midwestern US; & (6) organizing against toxics on the Mexico/US Fronteras. It is hoped that learning about this range of underheard voices will foster a meaningful discussion about what an ethics of care entails for practitioners, researchers, and teachers in environmental communication praxis.

Chair: Stacey Sowards Stories matter--they shape our understanding of our world and of possible future horizons of action. These papers explore narratives pertaining to middle-aged consumers and sustainable development, a range of sustainable futures, and various depictions of environmental (in)justice.

Chair: Thais Brianezi Panelists take stock of the current state of environmental communication research and practice, and discuss ways to move our field forward in areas of better media coverage, more impactful leadership, more globally inclusive research publications, and more.

Chair: Christine Gilbert Resource extraction, whether tied to energy or minerals or water, is often a site of significant political conflict reflected in competing discourses. Papers in this panel look at these dynamics in diverse locations, including the Ohio Valley, the Mojave Desert, and Puerto Rico.

All meals vegetarian.

Chair: Carrie Freeman For several decades, environmental advocates have used a variety of "justice" or "rights" oriented approaches to move their causes forward. This panel provides insights from an environmental lobbyist, a story from the capital city of Pennsylvania, a review of "lawfare" cases in Australia and the United States, and an overview of how the "rights of nature" are being used as a basis for advocacy and even litigation in the United States.

Chair: Marilyn DeLaure What do mushrooms, dolphins, trees, and sparrows have in common? Come to this panel and find out, as presenters explore instances of "more-than-human" communication activity in a variety of local settings.

Chair: Jen Schneider Corporations play a major role in debates on environmental policy, and also help to shape broader frames that we use in our everyday discourse about what is sustainable or just for our world. Papers in this session explore strategies and impacts (often adverse) of corporate environmental communication, focusing on contexts of sports management, biomass production, "sustainable" product campaigns, and carbon offsets.

The nation-state is unequal to the challenges of a climate-changed world, from the need for planned retreat and increased freedom of movement to the fair and reparative distribution of resources. This roundtable will converge around the question: “How can we imagine and realize just climate futures beyond the nation-state?” Panelists will think through quandaries of scale and temporality: How media and movements from the hyperlocal to the transnational levels can push beyond the nation-state’s limitations and exclusions, and how possible futures can be forged through addressing past injustices and current inequities. Grappling with these questions of scale and temporality are crucial for producing media and organizing movements that contest authoritarian regimes of power and reject the doomsday prophecies of climate apocalypse. Indeed, apocalyptic imagery stifles the discussion of better worlds. Imagining and visually representing alternatives to the end-times and alternatives to authoritarianism are increasingly at the center of many contemporary movements for climate justice, such as the Buen Vivir movements in Latin America that build on Indigenous knowledge to imagine new forms of coexistence and the Right to the City movement’s emphasis on uniting communities around the world in the face of hostile development and legislation. The ultimate goal of this roundtable will be to learn and draw inspiration from the work of activists, artists, and media-makers who are organizing movements within and across borders and co-creating radical visions for what just climate futures look like.

Chair: Catherine Bruns Intersections between race, gender identity and expression, geography, and exposure to environmental health risks, as well as ways we understand and talk about these intersections, form the starting point for papers in this panel. Presenters draw from experimental work as well as case studies from Indonesia, the island of Kiribati in the South Pacific, and the midwestern U. S.

Chair: Anke Wonneberger This panel offers a wide range of social science research on relationships between message strategies and audience attitudes and behaviors in a wide variety of environmental communication contexts, including perceptions of climate change and particular weather systems, foreign aid, and more.

Chair: Emily Diamond Examining discourse from the Danish and Canadian news media and U. S. military leaders as well as two centuries' worth of "wilderness" references, these panelists take a deeper dive into the structure, complexity, and evolution of symbolic choices in communicating aspects of "environment."

Chair: Brian Cozen Members of this panel span the globe--including Indonesia, Chile, Africa, and the U.K.--to give us a variety of analyses of "voices" of activism. This work re-affirms the value of both global and local perspectives.